The Minister of Railways and Coal, Shri Piyush Goyal has launched “Rail Heritage Digitisation Project” of Indian Railways in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. The first-of-its-kind project aims to showcase India’s rail heritage to the national and international audience in an online story-telling platform. The project can be accessed through this link: https://artsandculture.google.com/project/indian-railways

Key Highlights

It is the largest cultural heritage digitisation project not only in India but possibly in the entire Asia Pacific Region.

The collaboration with Google Art and Culture has enabled the Indian Railways to digitise National Rail Museum, Rewari Steam Centre, three World Heritage Railways, CSMT Mumbai building and other prominent aspects of country’s rail heritage.

The partnership also includes the dimension of Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi facility that has been set up in 711 stations currently and the railways plans to take it to over 6000 stations.

The railways will also be setting up 22 digital screens across different locations in India for showcasing the historical project.

Background

Railways in India started its journey on 16th April 1853 between Bori Bunder and Thane.

The Railways India not only expanded to be one of the largest networks in the world but also significantly contributed to the social, technological and economic development of this country.

Indian Railways has also created one of the largest repositories of industrial heritage in the World. Glimpses of Railway history and evolution are captured in 33 Rail Museums & Heritage Galleries, four World Heritage Sites, hundreds of buildings, bridges, locomotives, coaches, other rolling stocks, artifacts.

The digitization of rail heritage hence will provide immense opportunity to contextualize artifacts and other heritage assets with stories, thus making them more meaningful to the next generation.

Digital heritage also removes the bottleneck of being physically there and thus providing universal access to the large repository of knowledge.